The Devil's Punchbowl Read online

  As I reread the message, the free-floating anxiety that has haunted me since last night suddenly coalesces into a leaden feeling of dread, as close to a premonition of disaster as anything I’ve felt before.

  “Everything copacetic?” Necker asks from what seems a great distance.

  “Fine,” I rasp, still staring at the message. “Just my daughter texting me from school.”

  I grab for my seat as the chopper bucks into the air.

  “Easy, now,” Necker says soothingly. “Sit back and enjoy it. Boy, what I’d give to still have my little girl at home. It goes by so damn fast, you miss most of it. It’s only later that you realize it. That you were in the presence of a miracle. You know?”

  I nod dully. Bring a gun? Jic? Just in case? In case of what? I’d give anything to take back the encouragement I gave Tim to pursue evidence against Mr. X and his employers. Yet somewhere beneath my panic surges the hope that Jessup, even after thirty years of drug abuse and aimlessness, has somehow proved able to do what he promised to do.

  “Don’t you miss a minute of it,” Necker advises. “But, hell, what am I telling you? You had the sense to get out of the city and bring your kid to a place like this. A place where people are who they say they are, and you don’t have to worry about all the sick crap that goes on out there in the world.”

  I flick my phone shut and force myself to nod again.

  “A goddamn sanctuary,” Necker pronounces. “That’s what it is. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I guess I’m not above a little selling after all.

  CHAPTER

  8

  The hours after receiving Tim’s text message are an emotional seesaw for me; panic alternates with wild hope that Jessup has somehow obtained evidence of fraud and gotten safely away with it. This hope is a tacit admission that Tim’s allegations are neither exaggerations nor paranoid fantasies. The maddening thing is that I’ll have to wait until midnight to talk to him. I assume his choice of hour means that he intends to stay on board the Magnolia Queen until the end of his shift. Why doesn’t he simply walk off the boat, I wonder, and race up to my office at City Hall? My endless analysis of this question puts me into such a state that Rose, my secretary, asks repeatedly whether I’m all right and even convinces me to lie down for an hour on a cot in the civil defense director’s office. Lying by the director’s red phone, I find it almost impossible not to call Tim, but somehow I manage it. If he’s willing to risk his life, the least I can do is take his precautions seriously.

  The afternoon passes slowly, with Rose doing her best to handle the calls from the various committees and charities using the Balloon Festival to generate support or contributions, and Paul Labry fielding complaints from merchants and residents involving zoning and noise violations. Like the other selectmen, Labry has a full-time job, but he always makes an extra effort to help me during crunch times.

  From the volume of calls and the traffic outside City Hall, one thing is certain: Even if Jessup is right and Natchez is festering with corruption beneath its elegant facade, the “Balloon Glow”—tonight’s official opening ceremony of the Great Mississippi River Balloon Festival—will go on.

  I manage to get out of City Hall by six and collect Annie from my parents’ house, where she usually spends her after-school time. I can tell she’s excited as we drive toward the bluff, and she blushes as the police wave us through the big orange barricades at Fort Rosalie. Annie’s at the age where anything that makes her stand out from her friends mortifies her, but I sense that she’s enjoying the VIP treatment.

  The sun has already set below the bluff, and the truncated roars of flaming gas jets sound from beyond the great mansion whose grounds provide the setting for the town’s biggest festival. Annie gasps as we round the corner of Rosalie, and I feel my heart quicken. The term balloon glow perfectly describes this night ritual; from a distance the balloons glow like giant multicolored lanterns against the black backdrop of sky. But up close, among the inflated canopies swaying in the wind, the experience is much more intense. When the pilots do “burns” for the spectators, you can feel the heat from thirty feet away. Yellow and blue flares light the night like bonfires, awing children and adults alike. The tethered balloons tug against the ropes binding them to the earth, and kids who grab the edges of the baskets feel themselves lifted bodily from the ground. The ceremony is a perfect prologue for tomorrow’s opening race, when the balloons will leap from the dewy morning grass and fill the skies over the city, pulling every attentive soul upward with them.

  “I’m glad ya’ll decided to go ahead with it,” Annie says, grabbing my arm as we hurry to join the people streaming among the balloons. “This will help the refugee kids forget about the hurricane.”

  She tugs me toward the nearest balloon, and I use her momentary inattention to check my cell phone for further text messages. I don’t know if I’m hoping Tim will cancel the meeting or move it forward. All I know for sure is that I want the truth about Golden Parachute. But there’s no message.

  I spend the first forty-five minutes with Annie, looking at everything she instructs me to and buttonholing pilots so she can ask them all kinds of questions about the flight parameters of hot-air bal loons. I get buttonholed myself a few times, by citizens with questions or complaints about their pet interest, but Annie has become adept at extricating me from such conversations. TV crews roam the grounds of Rosalie with their cameras: one from Baton Rouge, ninety miles to the south; another from Jackson, a hundred miles to the north. I promise a producer from the Baton Rouge station that I’ll give her five minutes at the gate of Rosalie, where they’re interviewing pilots and Katrina refugees. I plan to take Annie with me, but two minutes after I make the promise, we walk right into Libby Jensen, and something goes tight in my chest.

  “Libby! Libby!” Annie cries, running forward and giving her a hug. “Aren’t the balloons awesome?”

  “Yes, they are,” Libby agrees, smiling cautiously at me above Annie’s head.

  Libby is a Natchez native who went to law school in Texas, married a partner at her Dallas firm, had a child by him, then divorced him after discovering that he’d kept a series of mistresses during the first decade of their marriage. She liked practicing law about as much as she liked being cheated on, so she brought her son back home and used her settlement to open a bookstore. Her charisma and sharp business sense have made the shop a success, and several author friends of mine stop to sign books there when making the literary pilgrimage from Oxford to New Orleans. After Caitlin left town, Libby and I found that our friendship quickly evolved into something that eased the loneliness we both felt, and that mutual comfort carried us through most of a year. But her son, Soren, has some serious anger issues—not to mention a drug problem—and Libby and I disagreed about how best to handle that. In the end, that disagreement drove us apart.

  Tonight is the first time we’ve found ourselves together since ending our relationship, and I’ve worried it would be awkward. But Libby’s soft brown eyes shine as she hugs Annie, and in them I see an acknowledgment that the sadness she feels is in part her own choice.

  “Where’s Soren?” Annie asks, reminding me that Tim said he’d seen Libby’s son down on the Magnolia Queen, looking high as a kite.

  Libby rolls her eyes to disguise the anxiety that’s her constant companion. “Oh, running around with his friends, complaining about the bands they booked this year. Where are you guys headed?”

  “Daddy has an interview,” Annie says, obviously not enthused by the idea of standing by while I play talking head.

  “Well, you can just come with me while he acts like a big shot for the cameras.” Libby gives me a wink. “I just saw some of your friends diving into the Space Walk.”

  “Can I, Dad?”

  I question Libby with a raised eyebrow, and she nods that she meant the invitation sincerely.

  “Okay. I’ll catch up in a half hour or so. We’re not staying long, though. I have some work to do tonight, and I want to be rested for that balloon flight tomorr
ow.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Libby says, chuckling like a wiseass.

  “I’m making him take a barf bag,” Annie tells her. “Seriously.”

  I wave them off and head back toward Rosalie, wondering where Tim Jessup is at this moment. Dealing blackjack on the boat docked below the cemetery? Or hiding out in some hotel room with stolen evidence, chain-smoking cigarettes while he waits for midnight to come? There are no hotel rooms available, I answer myself. Implicit in my worry about Tim is a fear of violence, and it strikes me that violence has always been a part of the ground beneath my feet. Fort Rosalie, the original French garrison in Natchez, was built in 1716. In 1729 the enraged Natchez Indians massacred every French soldier in the fort to punish them for ill treatment—for which French reinforcements slaughtered every native man, woman, and child they could find the following year. Rosalie went on to become General Grant’s headquarters during one night of the Civil War, but by then it had presided over untold numbers of robberies, rapes, and murders in the Under-the-Hill district that lay in its shadow. Is it possible, I wonder, that in some dark clearing across the river men are gathering to watch starving animals tear each other to pieces while half-naked girls serve them drinks?

  As I round the east corner of Rosalie’s fence, a tungsten video light splits the dark, and several brown heads begin bobbing in its glare. If the gas jets of the balloons look like lanterns, the video light is a white-hot star illuminating a blond woman with a handheld mike standing before Rosalie’s gate. She’s interviewing some children who apparently fled here from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Two TV trucks are parked nearby, and more than a dozen journalists call questions to the kids from the shadows behind the light.

  As I near the spotlight’s halo, the producer I spoke to earlier waves me over and tells me what she wants: the basic Chamber of Commerce routine. When the kids finish, I take their place before the gate and squint against the glare while my pupils adapt.

  On TV I tend to come across more like a district attorney than a mayor, and this has been a double-edged sword. Despite my diminished enthusiasm for the job, after two years in office I can give the city’s PR line on autopilot. This year’s Balloon Festival, however, has more meaning than usual. With the city’s hotels and shelters filled to bursting with suffering families, many locals believed we should cancel the races out of respect for the hurricane refugees, and also to keep from straining the city’s overtaxed resources. But the Balloon Festival is a twenty-year tradition, and I, along with several community leaders, championed the idea that the work required to bring off the races under extraordinary circumstances would prove a unifying force for the community. As I explain this to the brightly blank eyes of the TV reporter, she acts as though my words amaze her, but I know she’s thinking about her next question, or her eye makeup, or where she can get a sugared funnel cake like the one a refugee kid is eating. I try to wrap up my pitch with some enthusiasm for the citizens who’ll see the report from home.

  “Critics argued that with the hotels filled, the balloon pilots would have nowhere to stay,” I say, “but dozens of families have generously opened their homes so that the festival could go forward. We’ve had more volunteers for the support crews than we’ve ever had before. After feeling the outpouring of energy up on the bluff tonight, I believe events are going to bear out our optimism. The best thing you can do in the aftermath of tragedy is to focus on the present, because that way lies the future. Thank you.”

  I move to step out of the light, but suddenly a cool, calm female voice with no accent reaches out of the dark and stops me.

  “Mr. Mayor, some refugees have claimed that they’re not receiving the relief checks that the federal government promised them. Could you comment on this for our readers?”

  Caitlin. She is here.

  I shield my eyes from the glare. “What paper are you with?” I ask innocently.

  “The Natchez Examiner,” Caitlin answers with the faintest trace of irony. “Caitlin Masters.”

  “Well, Ms. Masters, welcome back to Natchez. As for the relief checks, they’re a federal matter and consequently not within my purview. Could someone kill that light, please?”

  “What about the contention of two of your selectmen?” Caitlin continues, a fine barb of challenge in her voice. “They say there’s been a great deal of fraudulent application for relief by refugees, with some people going through the check line three and four times with one Social Security number.”

  To my surprise, the spotlight goes dark, but I can’t pick Caitlin’s face from the red afterimage floating before my eyes. “As I said, those relief checks are being issued by the federal government; therefore, fraud in obtaining them falls under federal jurisdiction. I suggest you speak to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “I intend to.”

  “Good luck. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy the festival.”

  The knot of reporters breaks up quickly, leaving Caitlin and me with two techs packing equipment. My eyes having recovered, I see immediately that she looks as good as she ever did, unique among the women I meet in my daily life. Caitlin’s bone-white skin, her waterfall of jet black hair, and her startling green eyes combine to radiate an almost disconcerting sense of self-possession. This woman is smart, you sense on meeting her, probably too smart for her own good, or anybody else’s.

  “You want to walk?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  She gives me an easy smile and starts away from Rosalie, walking across the head of Silver Street, the hill road that leads down to one of our casino boats, then toward the bluff proper. Caitlin leads me along the fence, on the asphalt path laid by the Corps of Engineers when they reinforced the bluff. Eighteen inches beyond the fence, the land drops like a cliff to the banks of the river below.

  “You never were much of a walker,” I comment, “unless you were headed somewhere specific.”

  She laughs softly. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

  I murmur in surprise.

  “So how’s it going?” she asks, her words banal but her tone something else altogether.

  When you practically live with someone for six years, you come to know their rhythms the way you know your own. Their way of talking, the way they breathe, sleep, and walk. Changes in those things communicate messages if you pay attention, but as I walk beside my old lover—old in the sense of long experience together—I find that our separation has dulled my perception of her secret language. That is if she means anything beyond her literal words. Maybe in this case a walk is just a walk.

  “It’s been hard,” I say quietly. It’s tough to admit you were wrong about something, and even harder to admit someone else was right. “Harder than I thought it would be.”

  “People don’t like change,” she says. “I see it every day, wherever I go.”

  “You said you’ve changed.”

  Her green eyes flicker. “I said maybe.”

  The small park we’ve entered was the main venue for festivals when I was a child, the white gazebo atop the bluff a gathering place for painters and musicians and even ham-radio operators, who came because the ground was the highest for miles around. At the gazebo steps, I let her ascend first, watching the clean line of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her back. God, I’ve missed her. She walks to the rail and looks out into the night sky over the river.

  “It smells the same,” she says.

  “Good or bad?”

  “Both.”

  Across the river, lines of headlights move east and west on the main highway crossing the hard-shell Baptist country of Louisiana. Twelve miles into that darkness, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were raised under the flaming shadows of God and Satan, while around them sharecroppers toiled in the cotton and sang their pain to the uncaring fields.

  “People think they’re in the South when they’re in the Carolinas,” she says. “And they are, I guess. But this place is still the South, you know? It’s unassimilated.”

  I murmur assent, but I still don’t eng
age in conversation, preferring to study her from an oblique angle. This is the closest I have been to Caitlin in months. In a crowd of Mississippi women she stands out like a European tourist. In our moist, subtropical climate, the milk-fed, round-cheeked faces of the belles usually last until thirty-five, like a prolonged adolescence. This beauty seems a gift at first, but when it goes, the rearguard action begins, a protracted battle against age and gravity that leaves many with the look of wilted matrons masquerading as prom queens. Plastic surgery only makes the masks more startling in the end. Caitlin’s face is all planes and angles, a face of architectural precision, almost masculine but not quite, thanks to feline eyes that shine like emeralds in the dark. Her every movement seems purposeful, and if she has nowhere to go, she stands like a soldier at rest. She never drifts. And remembering this, I realize that this walk is not just a walk.

  “What brought you back here?” I ask softly.

  She hugs herself against the wind shooting up the face of the bluff. “Katrina.”

  This answer is certainly sufficient, but it seems too easy. “You’re covering the aftermath?”

  “I’m taking it in. Trying to process it. I’ve heard a lot of disturbing things about what happened down there. The Danziger Bridge shooting, wide-open rules of engagement. The administration’s response on the humanitarian side, or lack of one. Talk about too little, too late.”

  There’s nothing original in this view. And I’m not much interested in a privileged publisher taking a luxury tour through the dark side of our national character. This reminds me of Caitlin as I first met her, a Northern dilettante who preached liberalism but who had no experience of the world outside a college classroom or a newspaper owned by one of her father’s friends.